Professor Costas Douzinas

Professorial Fellow Institute for Social Justice

Director, Birbeck Institute for the Humanities, Professor of Law at Birbeck College, University of London

Professor Costas Douzinas joined the Institute for Social Justice as a Professorial Fellow in 2015 and is currently the Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Professor of Law at Birkbeck College. He joined the Law School in 1992 and was Head of Department from 1996 to 2002.Costas was educated in Athens during the Colonels dictatorship where he joined the student resistance. He left Greece in 1974 and continued his studies in London, where he received the Masters in Law and PhD degrees from the LSE and, in Strasbourg, where he received the degree for teachers of Human Rights.

He taught at Middlesex, Lancaster and Birkbeck where he was appointed in 1992 as a member of the team which established the Birkbeck School of Law. Professor Douzinas is a visiting Professor at the University of Athens and has held visiting posts at the Universities of Paris, Thessaloniki and Prague. In 1997 he was awarded a Jean Monnet fellowship by the European University Institute, Florence. In 1998 he was a visiting fellow at Princeton University and at the Cardozo School of Law. In 2002, he was a Fellow at Griffith University, Brisbane and at the Universities of Beijing and Nanjing.

His research focuses on Human Rights, Aesthetics, Critical Jurisprudence, Postmodern Legal Theory and Political Philosophy. He was deeply involved in the British Critical Legal Studies Movement and was part of the team that set up the Birkbeck School of Law. Douzinas established and is the managing editor of Birkbeck Law Press. He received the lifelong achievement award by the Association of Law, Culture and the Humanities in 2014.

Costas is the author of numerous books including The Meaning of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2014), Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law (Cambridge University Press, 2013), both co-written with Conor Gearty, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis (Polity 2013), The Idea of Communism (Verso 2012)with Slavoj Zizek, Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political, with Matthew Stone and Illan rua Wall (Birkbeck Law Press/Routledge, 2012), Nomos and Aesthetics (Athens: Papazissis, 2009), Adieu, Derrida (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Routledge Cavendish, 2007), Critical Jurisprudence (with Adam Gearey) (Hart, 2005), The End of Human Rights (Hart, 2000), Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (with Lynn Nead) (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Justice Miscarried: Ethics and Aesthetics in Law (with Ronnie Warrington) (Prentice-Hall, 1995), Politics, Postmodernity and Critical Legal Studies: The Legality of the Contingent (Routledge, 1994) and Postmodern Jurisprudence (Routledge, 1990), with Ronnie Warrington.